Too Many Questions in Sonarpur
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-05-31 05:48:36
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
View all posts by this Author
On the morning of May 30, Abhishek Banerjee drove into Sonarpur to condole with the family of a TMC worker killed in post-poll violence. He did not expect to become the story. Stones, eggs and shoes followed. His shirt was torn. He borrowed a helmet from a policeman. Women shouted at him with a specificity that was either spontaneous fury or very good theatre, depending on who you believe.
Both sides have since performed their roles with practised efficiency. Banerjee declared the attack BJP-sponsored and pre-planned. The BJP said it was the natural consequence of public anger. TMC's Derek O'Brien questioned the security arrangements. Everyone has a narrative. Nobody yet has all the facts.
The questions that matter are more granular than the narratives. Did Banerjee inform the local police about his visit in advance? His team claims he did, which makes the security failure a serious one - and a serious one with a particular complexion, given that the state police now answers to a BJP government. If adequate protection was requested and not provided, that is not an administrative oversight. That is a political decision. Equally, if prior intimation was not given, arriving unannounced into a post-poll violence zone was imprudent for any MP, let alone one who leads an opposition party in a state where political violence has already claimed lives. Where was his statutory security detail? These are not partisan questions. They demand answers regardless of which side you are on.
The visual evidence complicates both narratives. Orchestrated political attacks have a recognisable choreography. What the cameras captured in Sonarpur looked less like coordination and more like accumulated rage finding an outlet. The women who confronted him invoked Abhaya - the trainee doctor raped and murdered inside RG Kar hospital - and asked why he had stayed silent then but arrived now. That is not a BJP talking point. That is a question with a history.
But genuine popular anger and political orchestration are not mutually exclusive. A crowd already furious is easy to seed with provocateurs. That is precisely why the prior-intimation and security questions must be answered transparently â they are the difference between an ambush and a miscalculation, between a state that failed to protect an opposition MP and an opposition MP who walked into danger without adequate preparation.
The pattern continued even after the attack. When Banerjee was taken to hospital, Mamata Banerjee alleged that hospitals had been instructed not to admit him. Belle Vue Clinic's own prescription told a different story - the doctor had recorded that admission was not required. The allegation was made regardless. This is worth noting not to minimise what happened in Sonarpur, but because it illustrates exactly how TMC now operates in opposition: every event, however ambiguous, is immediately absorbed into a single explanatory framework in which the BJP is behind everything. Sometimes that is true. Sometimes the prescription says otherwise. The inability to distinguish between the two is not a political strategy - it is a credibility problem.
Either way, somebody has questions to answer in Sonarpur. The women who confronted Abhishek Banerjee certainly had theirs. In a functioning democracy, all of them deserve answers.
